


don't go into the mist

by pharmakon



Series: Steven Universe [9]
Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon), The Mist - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Fusion, BAMF Connie Maheswaran, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Dark, Gen, Happy Ending, Major Character Injury
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-01
Updated: 2019-01-01
Packaged: 2019-09-11 22:06:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,321
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16861138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pharmakon/pseuds/pharmakon
Summary: A post office materialized out of the gloom, and Connie made a beeline toward it, pushing in the door with a littleding. She frowned when the door didn't open all the way. "Hello?" she called, trying to squeeze into the crack between the door and the frame. "Is this place closed?" She shrugged off her backpack and squirmed through, losing her balance a little as she overshot.Oh.For a long moment she processed only flashes: long dripping stingers, a poster on package requirements, movement against the walls, glassy eyes staring in her direction with a gaping mouth below them--A face with a swollen cheek, and a body attached to it, and a mangled hand flopping over the side of the desk. Connie choked back a gasp and stumbled into the door, making the bell jingle damningly behind her-- and the hundreds of little stinger-creatures in the room shifted and turned in her direction, humming low and ominous in the tiny room.





	don't go into the mist

**Author's Note:**

> This is so self-indulgent that it physically hurts, but hey, practice is practice, right?
> 
> Plus I found this in my drafts, so I figured writing work shouldn't go to waste.

 The mist drifted in just as the bus came close to its stop, and Connie watched as it thickened, blocking off the road and reflecting the bus's headlights back into her eyes. The bus driver cursed, then glanced up at Connie and looked a little guilty.

"Is this close enough to get out?" Connie asked, and the driver furrowed his brow.

"Might be. You sure you should be coming out here alone?" 

"It's only a day trip," Connie assured him, and he opened the doors. "Thanks," she told him, and stepped out onto the sidewalk.

The town she was in was the hometown of one of her favorite authors, a horror writer who'd written such classics as _THAT_ and _Vampire's Lot_ , and when her parents had gone to a wedding in the south of the state she'd begged to be allowed up here by herself. Roderick Queen was such a prolific writer, and his stories were always so bone-chilling! If she was lucky, she'd be able to swing by the museum dedicated to him, and the movie set for _THAT_ , and maybe get some cool souvenirs to show Steven when she got back...

The bus disappeared completely from view as Connie went farther down the sidewalk, and mist crowded her from all sides. She shouldered her backpack more firmly and decided to get into a building to wait until it passed; she wasn't going to get any sightseeing done at this rate. There weren't any other people around, anyway, so everyone else must have had the same idea.

A post office materialized out of the gloom, and Connie made a beeline toward it, pushing in the door with a little _ding_. She frowned when the door didn't open all the way. "Hello?" she called, trying to squeeze into the crack between the door and the frame. "Is this place closed?" She shrugged off her backpack and squirmed through, losing her balance a little as she overshot.

Oh.

For a long moment she processed only flashes: long dripping stingers, a poster on package requirements, movement against the walls, glassy eyes staring in her direction with a gaping mouth below them--

A face with a swollen cheek, and a body attached to it, and a mangled hand flopping over the side of the desk. Connie choked back a gasp and stumbled into the door, making the bell jingle damningly behind her-- and the hundreds of little stinger-creatures in the room shifted and turned in her direction, humming low and ominous in the tiny room.

Connie inched to the side, feeling for the crack between the door and the frame, and pushed the door open just a little more so she could slip through. The bell rang again-- _stupid_!-- and the bugs' humming shifted to a terrible growl. A few of them lifted off and shot in Connie's direction.

She slammed the door shut just as they reached her, and the glass cracked between them. Then, gasping as adrenaline flooded her system, she grabbed her backpack and ran.

*

Connie found an alleyway between two little shops, half-covered by the lid of a dumpster and a thrown-out sofa, and crouched between them, hoping it was enough to hide from whatever was out there.

There had been blood splattered against the door of one of the souvenir shops, accompanied by something she recognized from her books as _viscera_. There had been a severed hand in the middle of the street, being eaten by something that looked like a hybrid of a bat and a pterodactyl. There had been cars with smashed-in windows in the middle of the street, and an abandoned, empty stroller, and a dropped cell phone... A bad taste welled up in her throat. She had to struggle to control her breathing, and when she pulled out her phone she nearly dropped it herself, her hands were shaking so hard. She could call the Gems, and they could be here fast-- could protect anyone else here, could maybe protect her parents-- could maybe (shamefully) protect her-- but was this a Gem monster? She'd never heard of one that outright killed people, not like this--

It didn't matter, she told herself. The Gems had superior firepower. They could deal with this, once they came, and no one else would die.

But then her phone's screen lit up, _no signal_ screaming in red text in the center of the screen, and Connie's blood ran cold. There went that idea.

Something moved in the corner of her vision, and she ducked down behind the couch, breathing hard and fast. She heard scraping against the ground, the wet sound of tearing meat, a gurgling-- and then silence. No screaming. That was good, right? That meant whatever the thing had been eating had already been dead. It wouldn't have felt any pain.

Connie forced herself to relax, pressing against the sofa like it might swallow her up completely and take her out of this situation. She had to think. She was in a combat scenario. Most of the people in this town probably weren't trained for battle or experienced in it at all. There was a military base nearby, so maybe some of them would be soldiers, but most of them wouldn't be able to keep their heads in a crisis. Connie would have to do that for them, because she was a Crystal Gem, and people getting hurt was _her problem._

Deep breaths. So what did she know? She was in a small town that she wasn't familiar with, near the Eastern seaboard, and it was being besieged by a mist that brought monsters, or at least by a mist that correlated with the appearance of monsters. Visibility was almost non-existent. She didn't have any weapons, any allies, or any way to call for help-- to call for _backup_. Nothing had happened to the bus before they'd gone into the mist, so it was probable that the monsters didn't go outside of it.

She _hoped_ they didn’t go outside of it. She didn't want to think of what might have happened to the bus after she'd left, if they did.

Her parents wouldn't realize something was wrong unless they tried to call her or saw something on the news. They might realize there was a problem when she didn't come back tonight, but that would probably be too late. They might be in trouble themselves, in a way that a flashlight and some authoritative words couldn’t fix. They might be dead.

Connie felt like crying. Without the Gems, without her sword and Lion by her side, what was she? A squishy little human, not big enough to be a real threat and nowhere near strong enough to matter. The mist hung so low to the ground that it wisped around her legs where she curled up, whiting out everything more than a couple of feet from her. There could be one of those bug things about to fly right at her face and she'd never know. There could be someone else right there and she'd never know-- and they might never know that she was there, either.

She could just stay here for as long as she could, maybe, cowering like a prey animal until the mist cleared. That might give her a better chance of survival. But she couldn't imagine going back to face her friends and saying,  _I hid until the monsters went away._ Saying  _I let people die and did nothing_ like she hadn't been trained to protect Earth and everything on it, like she hadn't decided over a year ago to fight whenever she could, like she hadn't faced off against a Diamond--

If she were Stevonnie right now, she'd already be out there.

Connie closed her eyes and tried not to hyperventilate. The survival manual said that in disaster situations it was best to get shelter. Crystal Gem training said that she should always protect those weaker than herself. She could do one, and then she could figure out how to do the other. 

She pulled her feet back under her, rubbing her legs until the pins and needles went away, and stood up as steadily as she could. Slow breathing, heart beating so fast she could feel it in her throat, on edge and listening for the slightest movement, the slightest change that would make her dash for cover-- 

There were headlights somewhere in the mist, faint enough that Connie thought they might be on the other side of the street. If they were on the other side of the street, they might be in a parking lot, and they might be near a building. Buildings were _shelter_. 

Connie looked around, hands shaking without her permission, and wrangled her nerves. Then she ran.

Her shoes smacked against the pavement, so loud they kicked her panic up a notch-- too loud, they'd attract something, they _had_ to-- She skidded past the car with its headlights on and almost ran into a giant spider. The spider hissed and clicked low in its throat, raising its front legs, and Connie barely dodged before it sent a thin strand of web past her head. The strand hit the pavement steaming and ate through it like it was nothing.

_Oh, god, what would that do to human flesh--_

More and more of the arachnids crawled out from under cars and around shopping carts, and Connie fled from them without thinking, moving sideways from her goal and choking on her fear, stumbling over a pothole in the road and scraping her knees bloody-- 

There was something huge in front of her, long-tailed like a scorpion and _move, skirt close so it can't hit itself and duck behind a wall as it comes at you_ \-- The tail slammed into the wall and cracked it down to its foundations, and Connie forced herself not to cry out. The monster was coming closer.

Another, larger creature screamed something from farther away, and the scorpion-thing paused to screech back, giving Connie the chance to flee. She had to be at least a few blocks from that parking lot. The thing hadn't noticed she was gone yet, was still investigating the wall like it thought she had hidden there...

Her hand hit glass as she backed up farther, and she choked back a sob and clawed for a handle. Please let there be an opening. Please don't let the thing notice where she'd gone.

Connie didn't have time to react. "There's something at the door!" a voice hissed, and then a gunshot rang out, shooting a hole through the glass  _right next to her,_ and Connie slammed her hands over her ears too late. Pain made the world white out for a second, so sharp that she almost thought she'd _been_ shot, and she couldn't tell if she'd screamed. But she could see the creature turning, lifting its tail over its head, and it was coming her way... "Please let me in," she gasped out past the ringing in her ears, trying to think of another way through-- what if it would just kill them all? Should she run, could she cover these people, she didn't want to die-- "I'm not a monster, I promise!"

The door opened, and Connie was yanked into the building. "Oh, God, it's just a kid, you shot at a kid," someone was babbling. Connie twisted out of her rescuer's grip on reflex and moved away from the door, glancing at the ceilings, the vents, the walls-- no bugs. Just people. She _wasn't_ the only one.

Her whole body was shaking. Through the half-covered glass she saw the creature move away and nearly sobbed with relief.

"I thought it was a monster--" 

"And now there's a hole in the fucking glass, Harvey, you idiot--"

There were six other people in the gas station with her: an old man, a woman and a little kid, two teens who looked like employees, and an older man who looked like a manager. He was the one they'd called Harvey. The old man was bloody-handed, wild-eyed like the horses one of Connie's cousins liked to raise for races, and the teen who wasn't yelling, short like Sadie, was hugging herself and whispering what sounded like a prayer.

"Are you all right?" the woman with the little kid asked, looking at Connie with wide-eyed concern. Her child was sniffling and clinging to her pants and couldn't have been older than Onion.

Connie made herself nod and tried to still her shaking. She couldn't look like she was scared. A Crystal Gem wasn't _supposed_ to be scared, and she'd already messed that up, but now there were other people she had to help. "I-I'm fine. Just a little scraped up." She pulled herself together, trying to think past the stabbing pain in her ears, and added, "I'm Connie-- Connie Maheswaran. I came in on a bus."

Harvey and the other teen had stopped yelling, now, and were patching up the windows-- moving drink crates in front of them, mostly, and taping up the rest. The woman glanced over at them like she was worried and said, "I'm sorry you had such bad luck, then. I'm Sophia, and this is Jamal." The little child curled closer to his mother. "We've been stuck here since the mist arrived." She leaned closer and asked, softer, "What's it like out there? There was a police officer in here who went out to investigate, but he never came back. We heard screaming."

"The monsters killed at least a few people," Connie said, casting a worried ( _not_ terrified) glance at the door. It seemed so flimsy now. "I saw a body, and then I think there were others, caught in webs-- there are spiders that spit acid, and that giant scorpion thing, and these giant flies with wicked stingers." Her head really hurt. "Other things, too, probably." 

"Fuck," the teen from the door said emphatically. He growled something else and punched over a display of cheese puffs, sending them clashing to the ground-- "Fuck!  _Acid spiders_? How are we supposed to fight these things?"

"We don't fight them," the old man growled. "We stay in here until the military comes or the mist goes away." 

"Until we die, you mean," the other teen said tearfully. "Those things are gonna come in here next and tear us apart, and I can't even call my mom!"

"I didn't have any service, either," Connie said, because it was a choice between helpfulness and a panic attack and she could only afford one of those. "I think the mist is disrupting a lot of things."

"Well, good for you, brainiac," Harvey snapped. "How's knowing that supposed to help us? Who are you, anyway? Not a local kid, or I'd know you like I know these two morons." The boy glared at him and rolled his eyes, while the girl only started sobbing even more quietly. Sophia sent Harvey a quelling glance and went over to talk to her in a low voice.

"My name is Connie," Connie repeated. Her legs were starting to seriously sting, and she thought she might have scraped them up more than she'd thought. She touched her still-ringing ears, and her finger came away bloody. That wasn't a good sign. That was the actual _opposite_ of a good sign. "I came in on a bus. My parents are south of here, and I'm supposed to be back to our hotel room to meet them by the end of the day." If they weren't dead, that was. If they hadn't been dissolved in acid or eaten whole or stung until their throats swelled, if their corpses weren't webbed to the hotel ceiling--

"Uh-huh," Harvey said. He crossed his arms. "How do we know you're not just trying to trick us?"

"Harvey!" the boy snapped.

Harvey snarled at him, "Do you know this kid? Who even lets their daughter wander around all alone at this age, huh? How do we know the mist can't bring up human monsters, too, to trick us and get inside our defenses--"

"Shut up," the old man said. Harvey shut up, and the old man turned towards Connie. "You. Connie. Where're you from?"

 "Delmarva," Connie said, and her voice wasn't as steady as she would've liked. "I live near a town called Beach City."

"Beach City?" The crying girl looked up. "Like, _Keep Beach City Weird_ , that Beach City?"

Connie's panic derailed into confusion for a moment. "You read Ronaldo's blog?"

The girl leaned forward. "I've been following it for years, I--" She teared up again. "I thought it'd be cool, if monsters existed. I didn't think it'd be like this."

"So it's in some blog," Harvey snarled. "So what? It doesn't mean she's real."

"I'm pretty sure it does, actually," Sophia told him with a glare. "And _I_ think we should focus on the problems we have outside of this station instead of making new ones inside it. Connie, sweetheart, are you hurt?"

Connie shook her head and told herself it wasn't lying, then said, "Just a few scrapes. I need a first aid kit."

It turned out there was a first aid kit behind the counter. Connie settled in and talked with Jamal, uncomfortably conscious that she was being placed in the kids' section while the adults talked, and washed pebbles out of her scrapes. She dabbed the blood out of her ear, too, but she didn't know how to treat a ruptured eardrum. Her right ear rang and rang.

"We need to be prepared to be in this for the long haul. Rationing food, keeping watch, all that good stuff," Harvey was saying to the others. 

"I'll keep first watch," the boy said immediately. "Lana, there's a mop in the back still, right? And we sell knives."

_Make a spear_ , Connie realized, just as the boy said the same thing. She coaxed Jamal back to his mother and got to her feet. If they could get prepared-- she could help with that, she could be _useful--_ "How many knives do you have? Or-- anything flammable, or cleaning supplies, I'm  _really good_ at Chemistry." 

"We've got a broom somewhere," Lana said, staring at her. "And-- a ton of knives, and lighters--"

"That girl I fired last week left her hairspray in the back room," Harvey volunteered. "We could make a flamethrower?"

Connie's courage started to come back to her. This was something she could do. "If you have beer and cleaning rags we can make bombs, and we can use the knives to sharpen other things," she said, "and we could have two sentries, since just one means if they're attacked they might not raise an alarm--"

"Makes sense," the old man grudgingly agreed, cutting her off. "We've got that gun, too, even if we've only got two bullets left." 

Sophia's eyes flicked from Connie to Jamal. "Might wanna save those," she said, and Connie was barely starting to register the implications when she added, "In case something worse comes along."

"It won't come to that," Connie promised, and Sophia startled guiltily. "Everyone's going to get through this. We've got a base of operations, and food, and weapons. We can survive."

Harvey growled, "This ain't a video game, kid. These are real monsters we're fighting. Real  _fucking_ threats. They aren't gonna go down easy."

A cold trickle of fear ran down Connie's spine, but she pushed it back. _Don't panic,_ her mother had told her once.  _If a surgeon panics, so does everyone else, and then nothing gets done._ And maybe Connie wasn't a surgeon, but a six-thousand-year-old alien made of light had taught her how to fight, and that was more than any of these people could say. She had to keep her head. "That's okay," she said, forcing herself to smile, to look the older man in the eye. "I've fought monsters before."

**Author's Note:**

> I've only seen the movie for 'The Mist,' and this is only sort of based on the premise of that, mostly because I don't want to use exact characters. If someone seems similar to an existing character, you might wanna assume they aren't the same.


End file.
